A few of my friends and I will (occasionally) take a perfectly innocent phrase in one of our conversations and turn it on it’s ear with some good ol’ innuendo (in YOU end oh). The following convo was with a friend of mine, to whom I loaned the season 1 DVD set of Burn Notice…

Booya! Click to make bigger (that’s what she said).

Of course, later on I thought about it – and it could have easily been referring to some kind of medical show. Ah well. Can’t win ’em all, right?

Really, the countdown began a few months ago when I purchased my train ticket to Ottawa; Movie Marathon Six is almost upon us! Here is the program…

The King of Kong

New Jack City

Once

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Singin’ in the Rain

North By Northwest

Micmacs

The Black Hole

House (Japan)

The Human Centipede

Machete

The Fall

In a word: insane-o! I have seen only a few of these; the rest I am very much looking forward to watching.

So the usual hijinks will be hinjinksed: movie watching; tableau picture-taking; fan-film-making; sleep-deprivation. We might even do some webcasting and live chats; or maybe we won’t. Ah, movie marathons are the bomb!

We bought a car back in 2001 due to this minor inconvenience. Needless to say, consumer reports will tell you that the car we picked was a piece of crap.

I don’t like pointing fingers, though, so we will call the vehicle in question…

V. Jetta

Wait. That’s too obvious. Let’s just call it…

Volkswagon J.

Anyhoo…

We’ve had quite a number of problems with this car over the years, and so Dave has heard a lot of complaining from me on the subject.

So now Mrs. J and I are thinking about buying a new vehicle, mostly due to space issues. Our current car is just too small.

In a conversation with Dave the other day, I mentioned that we will finally be rid of our old car, which has served us fairly well, but also helped itself to our bank account. I told him that we’d finally be buyng a new one…

Dave: So that’s it eh?Jorge: Yes. I’m looking forward to getting a new car, man.Dave: So, if you could only go back in time once, would you warn yourself not to buy that Jetta or would you kill Hitler?Jorge: Well, I’d go back and warn myself for sure.Dave: Really?Jorge: Actually, now that I think about it, if I kill Hitler, Volkswagon might have become a different company and never made that car in the first place.Dave: Good point.

Every once in a while I have a conversation with someone that is so funny to me that I revisit it several times to brighten my day…

[Chris walks up to Jorge.]Chris: Hey. Have you had your flu shot?Jorge: Nope.Chris: I’m going to go over and get mine now. Wanna come along?Jorge: Nope.Chris: Oh. Okay.Jorge: Yeah. I’ve never actually had a flu shot.Chris: Fair enough.Jorge: I hope you don’t think less of me.Chris: I don’t think that’s actually possible.

What the hell, weather? You’d think that we lived in Vancouver and not Toronto given how much precipitation there has been this month.

Earlier this month saw me with my snow shovel moving water out of my backyard and over the lip of the asphalt that is the top of my driveway. I cannot even hope to tell you how much I moved. Needless to say that I was doing this for an hour.

After a leak in the basement last year, I’ve been a bit paranoid about lots of earthbound skywater.

Mrs. J called me in a panic, indicating that it had been raining for an hour where she works. Considering that it wasn’t raining at all where I was, on the other side of town, I was a bit nervous so I asked my awesome neighbour to check.

The report came back: No Puddles. PHEW!

The Dark Knight Semi-Triumphant

I posted a comment across my various status updates stating that I was not as impressed with The Dark Knight as I thought I would be…

Predictably, a number of people sent me messages imploring me to like the movie better.

Um.

I never said I didn’t like the movie. I just said it didn’t live up to my expectations.

I think that Heath Ledger’s death has catapulted this movie into that fuzzy area where people need to make more out of something to justify the loss of life.

I will tell you right now, that the movie is great. And whether Heath died or not, he was perfect in this movie. Absolutely perfect.

Camping Guitar Challenge

So Dave and I were talking about how camping always reveals how little we know about music. Specifically, we’ll start up a song around the campfire and inevitably trail off after the first verse and chorus.

So this year, we’re going to learn a bunch of songs in their entirety, so that we don’t look like ignorant jackasses. Here’s my list…

BRr>

Redemption Song – Bob Marley

Jack & Diane – John Cougar Mellencamp

Black Hole Sun – Soundgarden

Sucker – John Mayer

Some Fantastic – Barenaked Ladies

One Thing – Finger Eleven

The Luckiest – Ben Folds

Everlong – Foo Fighters

First of May – Jonathan Coulton

Disarm – Smashing Pumpkins

The Last Saskatchewan Pirate – The Arrogant Worms

Down to the River to Pray – Alison Krauss

Not really the easiest songs to learn. This could be great or it could be a disaster. I’ll let you know how it turns out next week, unless my camping friends murde rme in cold blood and dance about on my grave singing Allelujah

Try to learn how to write lists without ending the list prematurely with an item about learning how to write lists.

The DVD

I like to celebrate things. My favourite things to celebrate are people.

When we were kids, my brothers and I would look forward to the times when my dad would set up the slide projector and the screen and we would watch slides of all of the photos that had been taken over the years.

It was pretty awesome to watch ourselves grow and there would always be a new “chapter” to look forward to.

In the digital age, it is so easy to take pictures and just leave them there to look at later. How many people actually go back and look at them all?

One thing I’ve heard a lot of since I’ve become a parent is that it’s easy to forget what your child used to be like. I have a pretty incredible memory when it comes to important things like this, but even I will admit that sometimes I am amazed when I look at a picture from the beginning. She was that small?

So I decided to make a photo/video slideshow with a soundtrack based on the songs we listened to during Little J’s first year on the planet.

Sounds simple enough, right?

WRONG!

The DVD has spiraled out of control. Check out this meaty feature list…

Main feature is a two hour slideshow made up of at least eight hundred photos and forty videos, chaptered by month.

Songs from the soundtrack fill almost every moment, attenuated manually to allow the audio in the video clips to be heard clearly.

The great Don Lafontaine himself was kind enough to provide a birth announcement for us.

The Main Feature is encoded in high quality format, with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.

The second disc (yes, you read that correctly), will have all of the video clips from the year sorted by month and named for the sake of context.

This disc will also have a little video showing how Little J has grown, thanks to some foresight by us. We’ve been taking pictures of the three of us in the same pose/position relatively consistently over the last year.

Labels, case, the full nerdery.

So yeah. The main feature is done. The first burn didn’t work out well, most likely due to a disc defect. This worked out for the best, as there were some minor corrections to make.

Now onto the second disc!

The Song List for Camping

I usually bring my guitar with me on car camping trips. Two years ago, I bought a Martin Backpacker Guitar knockoff to bring into the interior.

It was nice to have it with us, but all of our songs eventually turned into mumbling and shitty fretwork because on one had we didn’t practice, and on the other we didn’t know all of the tabs for the songs.

That knock-off didn’t last very long, due to the poor quality of construction, so I dropped the money for a real one.

I’ll be damned if I spend good coin on a nice guitar for camping and don’t learn any songs all the way through.

So Dave and I have an agreement that we will each learn ten songs all the way through. Some of the songs on my list…

Sucker by John Mayer

Some Fantastic by BNL

Redemption Song by Bob Marley

Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

Of course, I don’t know how committed Dave is to this venture. One time we had a deal that ended up with me owning every Mortal Kombat inspired music CD and him asking me why I expected him to own every KMFDM disc on the market.